James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Saturday, July 26, 2014

Here's an optical illusion. This woman seems to be looking to our left when we see her up close, but she switches to looking to our right when we back up and look at the same face from across the room.

Here are two women with light gray eyes. They're looking more or less forward, right?

If you look at the same image files at a much smaller scale, the eyes of the two women seem to be looking at each other instead of looking forward.

To create the faces, scientists rendered the eyes so that the sideways-looking eyes were rendered in the form of coarse, blurry detail, and the forward-looking eyes were rendered with fine detail.

Back up enough and these ladies will all smile at you.

Our brains process fine and coarse detail in different ways, as was first made famous with the Albert Einstein / Marilyn Monroe hybrid image illusion. That's also why we need to back up from our portrait paintings while we're working on them. Otherwise we can unknowingly set up contradictory information streams at the level of fine and coarse detail. Every portrait painter has experienced eyes that seem to move or a smile that seems to change when the piece is viewed from farther back.

These gaze illusions have an eerie effect because it's so important to us humans to know which way another person is looking, and misreading gaze direction is a major issue for social interaction. That's also why it creeps us out to talk to someone up close who is wearing mirror shades.

Unsettling yes. On the other hand if that is your intention, maybe ghost or zombie portraits, then this info is helpful.I also agree with your statement "That's also why it creeps us out to talk to someone up close who is wearing mirror shades."I always remove my sunglasses when first meeting people so they can see my eyes and be put at ease. Interestingly most people will unconsciously do the same.

Ooh! I read about this in a book on visual perception. This is a result of the intermediary cells in the retina and the first receivers/processors of those signals in the visual cortex.

The biological machinery of our retinas and our vision isn't comprised of a plain array of "uniformly-sized pixel detectors" but a mix of (among many other things) a detection of fine and broad changes in value— ie, sharp and blurry edges but conscious perception tips toward the fine stuff, even if we still have an inkling of the broad.